Coffee Chat with Trevor Abes
Pour yourself a nice steaming cup and settle in to get to know Trevor Abes a little better.
Tell us a bit about yourself. Who are you? Where are you located? Do you have a day job?
I cover business news, mostly Canadian public companies, for The Market Herald Canada. I've been based in Toronto for the past six years.
How do you take your coffee? Black.
What Blank Spaces issue were you first published in? Volume 3, Issue 2
When did you first know you wanted to write? When I saw a segment about William Blake's "The Lamb" on The WB's Historama, ripped the structure off in my own poem, and impressed my 13-year-old self.
What are you reading right now? What is it about and what keeps you coming back to the pages? Richard Siken's War of the Foxes. He is really good at dealing with big ideas through visceral images.
What role has Blank Spaces played in your creative journey? It's an essential part of my body of work and of where I was in that time in my life.
Tell us a little about the piece Blank Spaces published and how it was received by family, friends, and the greater community? It's a piece of short fiction based on a TED Talk called "How I became 100 artists". I ended up writing a whole book of them, which I self-published as The New Frontiers of Conceptual Art.
Where has your creative journey taken you since being published in Blank Spaces? I've published a couple books since then. The most recent is called The Breakup Suite, which is about the end of a relationship. I was fortunate to have it hit #1 on Amazon soon after it came out.
What does your writing process look like? Right now, I spend 2-3 hours on one poem per weekend. I intend to have a draft for my next poetry manuscript ready by year's end. The book is about repurposing old drafts I thought were garbage at the time.
If you could tell your young creative self anything, what would it be? Make work consistently and take artistry less seriously. It matters that you made it, not how it was received.
Do you have any writing rituals that help the words flow? Music, mostly. And it's generally songs I've heard hundreds of times. Current tracks on rotation include Derek Trucks Band's "Get What You Deserve" and Lake Street Dive's "Use Me Up".
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Learn more about Trevor’s work that has been featured in Blank Spaces here.
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